| Bad for them? How so. Windows can sell itself on its own merits, and has been for ages. Meanwhile, dev tools is a billion dollar a year revenue division, and yet it could be even bigger. C# is one of the best languages around at present, but a lot of the "cool kids" don't use it because it's too tied to the Microsoft stack. I typed a bunch of stuff here already but I just deleted it, instead I'm going to go with an analogy. If devs are cats then doing things like porting the .net toolchain to linux/osx is like leaving cat food outside. And that's precisely how you turn feral cats into house cats. Cats will go where the food is. And they'll keep coming back to it night after night. If you treat devs right, and give them the tools they want on the platforms they want they will become encouraged to turn to you for support. They will buy your IDE and other dev tools. They may even buy your OS and database tools. Additionally, by increasing the adoption rate of the .net toolchain it makes it that much easier for devs to write for winphone, windows, xbox one, etc. If you encourage devs to use C# for android/iOS development then the cost/benefit prospect for shipping a winphone version of an app changes dramatically vs. using raw java/obj-C. It's win/win for devs and for MS. |
ASP.NET and C# may be incredibly amazing, best-thing-since-sliced-bread, when compared to what exists for Windows developers, but, for most developers who live outside the Microsoft ecosystem, it deserves no more than a "meh". There are tons of languages in the C# space, and even more tons of modern web frameworks to choose from. Why would anyone pick ASP.NET when they have so many other toys?